Core concepts

A handful of concepts show up throughout the platform. Understanding how they relate makes everything else easier.

The building blocks

• Organization — your healthcare entity on the platform. Most things you create belong to your organization.
• User — an individual account that signs in. Users belong to an organization and have a role that determines what they can do.
• Server — an integration server (an Open Integration Engine / Mirth instance) that you operate. Servers run channels and are the endpoints of data flows.
• Channel — a message route on a server. In the Contact System, a published channel is one you’ve exposed so partners can send to it or receive from it.
• Contact request — an invitation you send to another organization to establish a working relationship.
• Agreement — the active relationship created when a contact request is accepted. An agreement is what makes it possible to share channels and provision connections.
• Grant — permission you give a specific contact to access a specific channel. Grants are scoped and revocable.
• Connection — a secure tunnel involving one of your servers. There are two kinds:
  • An OpenShare connection moves channel data between two servers (including managed channels).
  • A console connection gives remote admin console access to a server. Each console connection is provisioned as read-write or read-only.
• Gateway — the technology that powers connections: encrypted gateway tunnels that traverse firewalls without inbound network changes.

How they fit together

The typical flow goes in one direction:

1. You register a server.
2. You find a partner in the Directory and send a contact request.
3. They accept, creating an agreement.
4. You grant the partner access to one of your published channels.
5. An OpenShare connection is provisioned over the gateway, and data starts flowing.

In the app, the Connect Channels wizard handles steps 4 and 5 for you: you say whether you’re sending or receiving (or connecting your own servers), pick the partner, and it creates the channel if needed, sends the offer, and shows live progress until the data link is up. See Connect channels, step by step.

Tip

Think of it as: an agreement establishes trust between organizations, grants decide what gets shared, and connections are the secure pipes that actually move the data.

A note on direction

Channels have a direction. A listener receives data from your contacts; a sender delivers data to a contact. A single agreement can carry multiple grants and connections in either direction. See Channels & published endpoints for details.

Tiers

What you can create — how many servers, contacts, published channels, and organizations you can have — depends on your subscription tier. See Subscription tiers.